Gen Y: My Wiki Adoption Story
Thursday, February 26th, 2009I’ve been volunteering at my secondary school scout troop with a few of my friends since 2005 and among “management”, we’re the most junior, the rest being school teachers. The difficulty that plagued us forever was that we were very scattered. Some were in school (and within that group, different schools), some teachers, some working adults. As a result, with the exception of physical meetings, it was very hard for us to share information that required decisions to be made.
The one singular thing that got on my nerves the most, was how documents (and meeting minutes in particular) were continuously sent via email. Some people had multiple email addresses, when the documents were updated people frequently referred to different versions thus creating a lot of confusion.
Thus in April, 2008, our wiki was born, primarily to deal with the issues of documents. A file dump, if you will.
I had to sell the idea upwards, but luckily there was little to no resistance to it. The problem though, only one other person and myself were actually using it.
Fast forward to 2009 and now we have a full-blown “Project E” (that stands for electronic) team, with the mission to fully digitise everything within the unit where possible. It’s a great feeling to see the team (most of whom are 18 or 19) embracing the tools and really realising that it is a hugely beneficial alternative to anything we’ve used before.
So we’re having proper meetings now to work out the kinks. How should the pages be used? Are we going to develop a template for our “project” pages?
And the biggest question of all: How do we get everyone – not just the Project E team – to really use this as an organisational tool?
It’s interesting to see how the wiki has developed from a file dump to an actual tool. Just having one practical usage has led to further exploration and incremental usage.
I’m going to keep blogging about this story as it progresses. Right now we’re trying to get everyone from the Gen Y segment on it, next stop, the “older” segment (aka the teachers). I can’t wait to see if it will happen.
Tags: documents, file dump, Gen Y, generation y, scout troop, wiki, wiki adoption, wiki as an organisational tool
